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Software testers are no different. They enjoy getting access to new innovation, the challenge of always pushing their skills, and they love exploring and breaking stuff. The best testers are less interested in working for large enterprises. They see themselves as rebels and enjoy a role most people would not.

To attract the best testing talent, Bugwolf provides access to some of the world's leading and most innovative digital products without conforming to the structure of a large organisation, or having to be in the office by 9am. They choose when they want to work, which projects to work on, and they are not tied to their desk or hired based on their geographic location.

And this means, we can attract the best talent from around the world and provide our clients with the very best skilled testers which they would not normally get access to.

There are times when manual testing makes more sense, such as in UX testing or with regard to short term projects where automation would not be cost effective.

On the other hand, automated testing is best in addressing large projects or applications with many users.  Automation presents the advantage of speed and repeatability, while shortening the delivery cycle and making information quickly available to all. These are all qualities important in large projects.

Both types of testing present other advantages as well, manual testing is more efficacious when test cases need only be run a few times.  It also makes for an ultimately more user friendly application, as human beings have had a chance to observe and experience the application in operation.

Automated testing works best in regression tests because automation can more easily cope with frequent changes in code.  It is pretty much mandatory in performance testing due to the need to simulate thousands of concomitant users.  It also works well in load testing or any testing that requires repeated execution of the same task.

Manual testing is the best option in any area that requires human skills, intuition, and creativity, this includes exploratory testing, usability testing, user acceptance testing and of course ad-hoc testing, when the knowledge and acumen of the tester is of primary importance.

Ultimately, automated and manual testing complement each other as part of a holistic testing scheme.  While there are those who prefer automated over manual or vice versa, the reality is that each is an important part of the software testing process.

Building customized software can get expensive, which may make an off the shelf system seem more attractive. But it’s important to realize that pre made software cannot always meet every business need. Generic software can also straightjacket a company's operations. For example,  software establishes operational policy simply by the way it functions. If the software cannot meet certain customer needs, the company will be forced to “go off policy,” in other words work around the software, to address those needs. So, it’s important for the software, that a business uses, to match established policy and procedures. Software should enhance and not confuse operations. This isn’t always possible with canned software. Off the shelf software makes it difficult to alter functionality to match specialized requirements. So, the first question to ask is does your company have requirements that would make it difficult to find an off the shelf match? If so, building your own may be a viable alternative.

Compatibility is another problem with off the shelf applications. Different applications designed to perform different but related tasks must be able to easily communicate with each other. If they can’t then efficiency may be hindered.  

You should consider building rather than buying pre-made software when your company is using vital legacy software that cannot or will not be replaced for some time, or if your business operations have specialized requirements that are not directly addressed by off the shelf applications.

Custom built software can be worth the price if it will help your business operate more profitably in the long run, providing the budget, technical expertise and time to build are available. Ultimately, it comes down to competitiveness. Will custom built software give your business a competitive edge? If the answer is yes, then building your own is probably a good idea.

Exceptional Digital Quality Requires An Exceptional Testing Toolbox

Building and maintaining software is hard. Ever-evolving device types, OS and browsers mean that the initial release is only half of the battle. Bugwolf clients are invited to pick and choose from our suite of testing challenge types to help you navigate the complexities of delivering digital quality. 

Click a link below to jump to that test type or continue scrolling to browse all:

• Exploratory Testing
• Functional Testing
• WCAG Testing
• iOS Update Testing
• Android Update Testing
• Cross-Browser Update Testing
• Test Case Design
• Bug Re-Testing
• Competitor Testing
• User Guide Testing
• Employee Beta Testing
• Customer Beta Testing
• Maintenance Testing

Exploratory Testing

Occasionally in-house testers become too close to a project to identify new bugs. Our professional exploratory testers provide a fresh set of eyes to help you quickly identify functional and user experience bugs.

Exploratory tests can be executed in staging or production environments. We recommend keeping the scope of these tests intentionally broad so testers can mimic the behaviour of end users. This allows you to uncover and resolve critical testing blind spots. 

Functional Testing

The digital landscape is complex. Device types have proliferated, OS are more diverse and browser updates are more frequent. Functional testing gives you confidence that your software works as it should on all required devices. 

Unlike exploratory testing, the scope of functional tests should be more narrow. Our testers will focus their attention on specific features and user-flows to ensure they work as intended. Testing will be conducted across a range of devices, browsers and operating systems to ensure your end users enjoy an optimal and undisrupted experience. 

WCAG Testing

WCAG is an international framework for digital accessibility best practices. Adhering to WCAG is not only good for the user experience, it’s also an important pillar of your digital strategy. The benefits of WCAG compliance include: reaching a larger and more diverse user base, meeting the accessibility requirements of government contracts and reduced legal exposure. 

Bugwolf’s professional testers will provide specific WCAG recommendations to help you become compliant and ensure new feature releases remain compatible with the guidelines.

iOS Update Testing

It’s estimated that 2.87 billion people will own a smartphone by 2020. iOS testing should be conducted after every major iOS update to ensure digital properties continue to perform as they should. Major releases are pushed to the market with very short notice, and occur every quarter, sometimes more frequently.

During these test challenges testers navigate your software using specific devices to proactively identify new issues that are directly related to known or unknown issues associated with new iOS releases. They are also aware of the impact of iOS updates and can keep an eye on particular nuances that can impact users.

Android Update Testing

In 2016 Google’s Android operating system accounted for 88% of the smartphone market. Android update testing, like iOS update testing, gives you confidence that your software is performing correctly immediate after major operating system changes. 

Whilst typically exploratory in nature, Android testing teams will provide additional attention to features and functionality that are likely to be affected by changes. They are also aware of the impact of Android updates and can provide insights around nuances that otherwise undermine the user experience.

Cross-Browser Update Testing

One of the greatest challenges for web-based apps and websites, is that the web is constantly evolving. Browser update testing is a type of exploratory testing that focuses on how existing digital properties are affected by major browser updates. 

Conducting proactive browser testing after major updates helps to avoid embarrassing and costly errors that range from simple display errors through to full-blown functional catastrophes. 

Our professional testers help you quickly get on the front foot and respond to new updates on almost any browser imaginable to ensure that your commitment to digital quality is not undermined by an external change.

Test Case Design

Occasionally testing requirements are particularly large, complex or challenging. In these situations, the most appropriate course of action is to step back and devise a clear, step-by-step strategy for achieving the coverage you need before you begin testing ...that’s precisely what test case design achieves. 

We’ll work with your team to get a deeper understanding of the software and your goals and outline a specific plan of attack for providing the insights you need ahead of deadline. 

Bug Re-Testing

Even after a bug is identified, it’s crucial to ensure it does not occur again in the production environment. However, asking developers or in-house testers to check their own work, is far from foolproof. 

Bug re-testing is a robust way to ensure that previously identified bugs do not continue to undermine the user experience. We do this by first liaising with your team to understand which bug reports have been prioritised and resolved, then asking our professional testers to once again try to replicate the original bug on a variety of devices. 

Competitor Testing

The most effective digital teams have a deep understanding of their competitive landscape. Bugwolf’s competitor comparison helps you understand the tactics, processes and technology behind user flows that are similar to your own. 

During this challenge, our professional testers will work through the key features of two or three of your competitors and provide commentary on what they’re doing well and what areas could be improved. The output is an insightful stream of reports which can play an important role in the execution of new projects.

User Guide Testing

Documenting systems and processes is critical to the adoption of complex technology. Many user guides though, quickly become out of date as applications evolve or were never particularly useful in the first place. 

During user guide testing, professional Bugwolf testers follow your documented process to navigate step-by-step through your applications. This allows us to identify vague or incomplete documentation that otherwise leads to more errors, higher support requirements and lower performance.

Employee Beta Testing

In-house teams are a source of valuable knowledge and insight. Employee beta testing allows you to engage your teams at various stages of the software development lifecycle. The benefits of this include: greater employee engagement, more rapid adoption, enhanced innovation and more robust software. 

During the setup, your testing director will help you: devise a suitable test challenge, invite relevant teams and manage bug reports as they occur. It’s also a great way of making employees part of the digital transformation journey.

Customer Beta Testing

There are numerous benefits of black box testing with professional testers, but occasionally, there is no substitute for genuine customer feedback. Bugwolf allows you to quickly and easily convert your customers into teams of beta testers who can provide direct feedback and insights on new releases. 

This is the perfect way to get a nuanced understanding about your customers, their UX preferences, functionality requirements and tech setup. You can even set up prizes and rewards to incentivise customers to provide deep, insightful feedback just as we do for our professional teams.   

Maintenance Testing

The web is an ever-evolving ecosystem. User devices, operating systems, browsers and third-party tools present complexity that digital teams couldn’t even fathom a decade ago. Nonetheless, robust, fast software is now considered a ‘must have’ and users have zero tolerance for shortfalls. 

Maintenance testing is the process of periodically reviewing existing digital properties to ensure they perform as they should across all required browsers, devices and OS. It’s similar in nature to exploratory testing - the key difference being that if focuses on existing functionality (not new releases). 

The goal of this test type is to highlight critical testing blind spots. Without maintenance testing, issues can arise and remain undetected for months or even years, at the expense of countless customers. 

What To Do Next

If you're an existing Bugwolf client, we'd be delighted to help get a selection of the above challenge types up and running for you. If you're new to Bugwolf, simply contact us to find out more about customising a testing plan to suit your needs.

But when I sat back recently to prepare to raise capital and started to calculated the cost of investing in what I was doing, the real numbers surprised me. The most important thing which dawned on me is money is not everything. Sure it’s part of the end goal, but money itself has no intrinsic value and a short life span when it comes to motivation.

Sacrificing my top paying job over the last few years has taught me what happens when you truly believe. It’s amazing to see the difference it makes to your life when you’re selling something which makes a real difference or solves a problem. I’ve realised anything is possible when you truly believe in what you’re doing

And this means, when you talk with people about what you do and the problem you solve, you will naturally deliver it with conviction and passion, and everyone wants to be a part of that.

While information processing was once a specialized activity that took place mostly out of sight in data processing departments, it is now a major element of our daily lives. This element has created the need for more and more applications to do more and more things. Digital technology has taken over everything, from the way we read books to the way we drive our cars. Consequently, the demand for new applications is rising with no sign of slacking off.

Mobile apps in particular are becoming the way in which people gather and use information and relate to each other in digital space. And so, the quality of mobile apps is becoming increasingly important. But what is quality? Developers tend to define quality by performance and function. However,  the average person defines quality as usability. No matter how well an application can otherwise perform a particular function, it will not be successful if it lacks usability.  Here are the important elements that make up a usable application.

The first is platform usability. A given application must be usable across multiple platforms. The fastest way for your application to lose popularity, or not even get off the ground, is to ignore a particular device. Nothing is more frustrating to a mobile user than to have an application not work on their specific device. This is why all applications should be extensively tested on how they perform across multiple platforms. While it may not be possible to test every device that your application may be required to run on, it is vital to test your application on as many platforms as possible.

Next comes navigation. This is a major issue that can result in failure, or at least monetary loss, if not handled properly. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about a web-based application,  a website or even something that works offline. Ease of navigation is particularly important when dealing with a small screen environment. It should take as few clicks as possible for the user to achieve his or her goals.

Information is also an important element of navigation and presenting information on a constricted screen can be difficult. This is where it is necessary to engage in detailed planning before writing any code. What information is needed and how it is to be presented should be determined well ahead of time.  And the door should be kept open to modification based on modular testing as the application is developed.

It's important to remember that small screens require simplified presentations. They should never be crowded with unnecessary information or activity. Input and output should be as simple and direct as possible. Also, it should be realized that interacting with a small screen will be slower than with a large screen or keyboard. Scrolling should be used as much as possible. It is easier to scroll down a page  than it is to jump from page to page. Jumping around is an invitation to confusion, so it's best to have all information relevant to a subject on a given page, and a particular subject should have its own page.

Don't forget that functionality should take precedence over design.  It may not always be possible to include everything that stakeholders want in the first version of an application.  Budgetary and time reasons may require that certain features be postponed until the next iteration.  If the application becomes popular then there is always a possibility for version 2.0.  And functionality should take precedence over design when it comes to interface and presentation, as well.  Don't make search procedures or operations more difficult by adding too much pizzaz to the screens.  Remember that good design is functional design.

A well designed user flow chart should be ready before design begins.  It doesn't matter whether it is a complex or simple application, having a flow map ready to go will help ensure a rational navigational structure.  And it helps to design for high demand first, such as designing for high definition screens.  Designing for the highest scale devices and then designing down as needed will simplify the design process and quite possibly eliminate bugs and user issues that could occur when designing from the bottom up.

User experience testing is a vital part of creating a truly usable mobile app.  It can tell you things you can not find out any other way.  For example, is that screen button too big or too small, or is there too much animation in the intro, are transitions smooth and does the application load quickly?  All these questions and many more can be answered through user experience testing.

All the truly useful mobile apps follow the same basic principles.  They are purposefully organized to be consistent in order to enable users to easily understand the interface layout without the need to remember complex actions or information.  This purposeful consistency is also simple.  Not only is it clear and concise, but it also uses established conventions such as folders and desktops in order to convey  operational requirements without the need for extensive user education.  Common tasks are presented in common ways and within the reality of the majority of users.  There is no need to learn an entirely new approach.  Rather, the application has a level of familiarity built into it from the start.

A well designed application also keeps the user informed of changes and all relevant information in an unambiguous way.  All required information and tools for a given task are easily visible in a way that does not overwhelm the user with too much information or too many alternatives at one time.  Finally a quality application is tolerant of misuse and offers the capacity to undo and redo at every step along the way.  It will also prevent errors, if possible, by being tolerant of unconventional inputs and assisting the user to make corrections.

Ultimately, rational design is the foundation of usability when it comes to mobile applications, and rationality is based on keeping the user in mind across the entire development cycle.

The increasing complexity of digital technology makes keeping tabs on customer requests much more complicated. Prioritizing customer problems and resolving them in a timely manner has become a major element of customer service. Client demand increases as sales go up and a company that is not prepared to address that demand will fall behind the competition. It is necessary to have the right information at the right time and be able to process that information efficiently.

It's a good idea to bring stakeholders in early, before the decision to purchase a particular customer service app has been made, so that the organization's actual needs can be addressed and business objectives can be taken into account.

But, simply deploying customer service software isn’t enough. It's important to know what problems you are trying to solve when choosing a customer service application. Know what customer service problems your company has already run into and realistically project the kind of problems it might face in the future. Make sure to get input from customer facing employees. There's nothing like knowing what's happening on the front lines.

While it is important to have a customer service system that your sales people find easy to use, it should also be easy for your customers to use. It depends on your business model and customer demographics. If your business is brick and mortar or you are selling to older people or selling a physical product, then having a physical phone system is vital, and it should be a system that enables people to blow through the automated system and actually talk to a person. Few things are as frustrating as answering one set of multiple choice questions after another in order to reach a live person or to find that there is no live person at all. A direct phone link isn’t as important if you are dealing with mainly younger or tech savvy customers, or selling exclusively online.

Don’t be afraid to take a phased approach. Layer in one or two applications and see how it goes. You’ll soon learn more and find out what’s missing. You can then confidently add those systems that best fit your real time business operations.

Continuous delivery is basically built around automating the four main stages of development. These stages are Building, Integration, Testing and Deployment. This enables transparency and feedback between different development and operational teams, while providing for continuous integration.

Continuous delivery begins with the coding of deliverable modular units that are then handed off to the subsequent teams. New features are integrated into the base code on an ongoing basis and each build is unit tested to provide feedback that travels back up the line.

Each new version is rigorously tested as the various aspects of the growing application are verified along the pipeline. The vast majority of this is done through test automation.

Automation also enables deployment to virtual environments before being deployed in the real world. Teams can construct virtual environments that enable reproducible results in a controlled ecosystem. This reduces risk at rollout. The automation of the development cycle makes it possible to monitor deployment and functionality before rollout is complete and makes for faster and more reliable delivery. It also means that software testing of new products can take place in realistic virtual environments, at any time.

Continuous delivery enables new features to be brought to production quickly and tested individually, integrated and tested again prior to rollout. This is very different from the traditional system where entire versions were implemented at one time. It also eliminates the problem of user acceptance testing taking place at the end of the cycle and often at the last minute. This is an important step forward in software development and testing, providing that quality and functionality are assured at each step along the way.

It’s hard for us to believe today, but there was a time when medicine was far from a respected profession and doctors were considered at about the same level as barbers. The foundations of modern medicine were laid during the Napoleonic Wars. Physicians of the era, faced with a high level of casualties caused by the advent of new technology and new warfighting techniques, were forced to recreate the way medicine was practiced. They transformed what had been little more than a craft into an evidence based science. Useless practices like bleeding patients to get rid of “bad blood” were replaced with results oriented treatments.

Since that time, medicine has taken numerous major steps forward and, with the advent of IT, is about to take another. While digital technology may not transform medicine as much as the germ theory of disease, it is changing the way treatment is delivered and medical problems are diagnosed.

One major change is the speed of delivery. Many major tests no longer have to wait for the patient to arrive at the hospital. Telemedicine has made it possible to perform TPA tests, CT scans and do blood work in the ambulance, while the patient is being transported.

Digital technology continues to transform treatment. Wearable wireless sensors can now reduce hospital stays as robotic surgery, miniaturized pacemakers and spectral computed tomography introduce lifesaving technology and improved forms of diagnosis.

IT has helped lay the foundation for a different kind of medicine. This new medicine will be more comprehensive and more intimately involved with the patient than ever before.

All of this means that doctors and hospitals will need to deal with and integrate new technology. While the integration of IT into medicine points to lower costs in the long run, bringing these technologies online means higher costs in the short run.

Those responsible for IT integration will require guidance and unbiased advice from those involved in technological development. The future of healthcare will be one of a partnership between the medical profession and IT professionals. Each will need to work closely with the other to ensure a cost effective adoption of the coming innovations

Software testing is the process of evaluating an application with the intention of establishing its functionality and suitability for an intended purpose. You might say that testing determines the difference between ideal and existing conditions and helps bring software closer to ideal by noting where software departs from intended operation and discovering what needs correction.

Testing cannot be done by just anyone, and who does the testing depends on the stakeholders involved and the resources available. Some large companies have their own in house software development teams, although this is increasingly becoming the exception and not the rule.

Testing breaks down into two broad sections. These are, testing during development and testing just before, during and after deployment. Testing during development is normally done on sections of code (modules) that are then linked together. The latter type of testing is sometimes referred to as user acceptance testing or user experience testing, depending on when it is done. Most tests in this phase involve the end users to some degree. Testing can also take place after deployment, when updates are made or reliability needs to be validated again.

Testing should begin as early as possible. This reduces cost and allows more time to discover bugs and improves the chances of delivering error free software. Testing during development can be based on Requirements and proceed through development and into the deployment phase. How early should it start? Even the gathering and verification of requirements can be considered a form of testing, as the more detailed and complete the requirements are, the less reworking will be required later, thus reducing the amount of update testing required.

Testing can be considered to be complete when the software has been verified and validated. Verification is mostly done during development and validation takes place toward or at the end of the development cycle. Verification is making sure that the software meets the functional requirements while validation determines that the software behaves as intended.

Validation testing is sometimes considered a luxury and may be minimized to lower expenses. This is never a good idea as it turns the end users into beta testers, which can ruin a software release and create public relations and business related problems. Also, validation is the exclusive domain of testers. Developers are assigned different elements or areas. Testers, on the other hand transcend the development cycle and understand software functionality and the relationship between different modules as well as software behavior. This is why thorough testing is a major component of successful software deployment.